Puppet has long been regarded as
nothing more than an open-source software configuration management tool.
The company has become a standard for automating the delivery and operation of
the software that powers everything around us. Well, this is about to
change. Puppet has evolved and has positioned itself to tackle
enterprise-grade problems. All of this and more, was announced on May
2, 2019.
So what makes this announcement so exciting? I sat down with Matt
Waxman, Puppet's Head of Products to learn more.

The promise of automation always has been its ability to manage a wide
range of tasks across all your systems, whether they're in your own
data center or somewhere in the cloud. But in order to automate, you need
to know what you have, and that's getting harder these days.

As development and IT shops look for ways to more quickly test and deploy
software or scale out their environments, containers have become a go-to
solution. With Docker and similar tools, you can spin up dev and production
containerized platforms that are fast, lightweight and consistent.

At some point, you probably have installed or configured a piece of
software on a server or desktop PC. Since you read Linux
Journal, you've
probably done a lot of this, as well as developed a range of glue shell
scripts, Perl snippets and cron jobs.

With Hiera, you can externalize your systems' configuration data and
easily understand how those values are assigned to your servers. With
that data separated from your Puppet code, you then can encrypt sensitive
values, such as passwords and keys.